Welcome back everyone. Today we’re covering Heroes of Hammerwatch, brought to us by Crackshell and Surefires Games, released in March of 2018. In it, you play as the titular heroes clearing out Castle Hammerwatch, a massive tower consisting of 6 areas of assorted monsters, traps, and treasure. It’s a top-down multiplayer dungeon crawler with roguelite mechanics, the general goal of each run being to reach as far as you can while sending back gold and ore to upgrade your town and give your next run a better chance.
You start by picking one of the available characters (though more are unlocked by completing certain tasks), and diving in to the dungeon itself. Each area has ~3 floors of enemies, ending in a gold-transporting elevator (to bank your proceeds) and a boss fight. Every new area brings new threats including traps and enemy types. Eventually, the player will die, and now they get to spend their gold to upgrade the town or invest in equipment for their next run. On the plus side, for every area cleared, there is a portal opened for future runs, allowing players to skip the zones that are now trivial, so long as they can clear out the special challenge that replaces them. As an extra bonus, for every level of boss defeated with a certain character, the player gets a bonus to their stats for all future runs, for example granting increased armor based on how far the Paladin has gotten.
As I’ve mentioned before, I enjoy Roguelites for their ability to save some measure of progress, even incremental, and HoH does a great job of this. Your heroes do not permanently die outside of the special “Mercenary” mode, so it doesn’t matter how many runs it takes to kill a boss or clear a floor, you will get there eventually. With the copious boons the town hands out, like base stat upgrades, drinks with special effects, and the ability to start with keys and items, the odds feel much more under your control than in a traditional Roguelike game.
I need to take a moment to talk about one in particular, the fountain. The fountain is a really cool feature, allowing you to stack the odds in your favor for a price, stack them against you for increased gold and experience, or balance the two out, say to accommodate your preferred playstyle. Though, it ends up feeling required, as the town and character upgrades eventually become prohibitively expensive at the base rate of gold gain.
The game is constantly pitting your short-term desire to do better on the next run against the longer-term desire of clearing the castle as a whole. The shops and elevators are a great example of this: They’re found in dungeons, the former trading items for gold as you’d expect, the latter transporting gold and ore back to the safety of the town. And thus, every time you see one of these, you have to ask yourself: “what is more important to me right now?” That mace could be just the push you need to clear the next boss… or make you lose out on the last few thousand gold you need to upgrade another town building. You could bank your gold and ore, but if you live to pick up more the next batch back will be taxed more heavily. The game is full of decisions like this and it helps to keep things interesting.
The retraux graphics are a nice touch, adding to the arcadey feel. I personally found them charming, though not everyone will think so. The enemies will eventually unleash an intimidating number of projectiles that make later stages very visually busy, maybe even cluttered, and not all characters are created equal in terms of weathering them, as some like the Thief and Paladin can plow through most assaults, while others like the Ranger and Priest will quickly perish, which puts more emphasis on co-operative sessions over singleplayer delving. I wish there was more than one track for each area though, as while none of the tracks are bad they eventually feel less enjoyable due to repetition. The sound work is simple but effective, as important tones like those marking the spawning of more dangerous enemies are clearly audible over the din of combat.
Seeing as HoH has some DLC, I’d be remiss if I didn’t spend some time on that as well. They add 2 new areas with increased difficulty and a couple new characters, as well as a bonus game mode consisting of fighting waves of enemies in a trap-filled coliseum. I particularly enjoyed the coliseum fights, as they’re much faster paced than the base game, bombarding you with enemies and items and encouraging players to keep the blood flowing to keep the spectators satisfied. I personally found the additions well worth the asking price, and the base game itself is available for a fair $12. If you are a player that measures price against playtime, I’ve managed around 90 hours, and have only beaten the first pass of the main dungeon with a couple characters, so there’s plenty of value for the money.
Anyway, that’s Heroes of Hammerwatch. It’s a fun time sink, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. It’s available on Steam.
Zeph's Den 